Gone Bush

By Paul Kilgour

The story of a wanderer, long-distance tramper and hut-bagging legend.

Paul Kilgour was bitten by the tramping bug early. He began going on epic trips as a young boy, beyond the farm and along the coast. During these wanderings, he met old folk living simply in tiny huts out the back of farms and on clifftops, and swaggers walking in remote and beautiful locations. Even at that early age, deep inside Paul stirred the spirit of adventure and a longing to go further. And further he went.

Gone Bush is about a lifetime of walking the backcountry. It tells stories of the eccentric characters he met along the way, some of the 1200 huts he's visited, and his most unforgettable journeys, including his 'long walk home' from deepest Fiordland to the top of Golden Bay. It's also a book about the powerful effects of being in the natural environment, doing what matters and living authentically. It is a charming, meandering, transportive read - like setting off on a serene tramp in the mountains, a heavy frost underfoot and the sun on your back.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Nov 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781775492047

Paul Kilgour

Paul Kilgour is one of the New Zealand backcountry's most famous names. He grew up in Northland during the 1950s and 1960s, when swaggies still wandered the backroads. When he shouldered his first tramping pack at age 21, he experienced a revelation, and knew he'd be doing this for the rest of his days. Kilgour has also had a lifelong obsession with baches, cribs and huts, and he is among the top hut-baggers of New Zealand. In 2007 and 2008, Kilgour walked the length of the South Island, an epic 1550-kilometre tramp from Fiordland to Golden Bay via backcountry huts and off-track routes. He lives near Takaka, Golden Bay, with his partner, Janet.

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Preface

I remember a trip in steep country in the Pyke Valley, Fiordland National Park. There were four of us moving through the bush on an unmarked trail about 50 metres above Lake Wilmot. My three companions all stepped across a small stream. As I went to follow, I sensed something moving above, and glanced upstream. A rock about the size of a caravan was rolling towards us. I scrambled back, the other three sprinted forward, and the rock went crashing past and on down the stream. As it gathered speed it wound up every strand of bush lawyer and supplejack from the surrounding bush, until the combined strength almost brought it to a halt. Suddenly everything snapped, vines whipping like high-tension wires, and the rock took off again, smashing through the bush and plunging into the lake. At that point every bird in the valley went ballistic.

Welcome to the serene pastime that is tramping in New Zealand.

Recently, I clocked up 50 years of it. I was a sheltered 20-year-old from a North Auckland farm when I ventured, dazzled, into the epic South Island backcountry on my first tramping trip. The following weekend, I bagged my first hut, a cosy four-bunker on a tributary of the Waimakariri River in Arthur’s Pass National Park. There was a heavy frost underfoot the next morning, but the sun soon cleared the top of the beech forest to warm us as we prepared to leave. Watching my companions re-lay the fire for the next group of trampers, I felt like an initiate to some long-established guild – although, in fact, recreational tramping was only a generation or two deep in those first years of the 1970s, and still fringe. When I started, it was possible to walk through somewhere like the Abel Tasman National Park and see virtually nobody – a terrific time to get bitten by the tramping bug.

And get bitten I did. In late 2019, on the Round the Mountain Track at Ruapehu, I bagged my 1200th hut. Last month, I knocked off my 1208th, a ‘secret’ (okay, illegal) hunters’ hut in the hills beyond Tākaka. They’ve come in all shapes and sizes, from ramshackle two-man bivvies to the new generation of Department of Conservation (DOC) mega-huts, and from Northland to the Subantarctic Islands. I don’t dwell on the tally so much as what those 1200-odd huts represent – a lifetime of wandering that began long before I even knew what ‘tramping’ was, when I was a five-year-old disappearing into the scrub beyond our Waimauku farm. It reached its zenith in 2008 when I walked the length of the South Island, from deepest Fiordland to my home in Golden Bay.

It’s a life peopled with backcountry characters who you don’t often see now, the type who, like me, were happiest on the hoof or holed up in a remote bivvy: swaggers, recluses, latter-day prospectors and high-country musterers. It’s a life enlarged by an intimate association with our glorious outdoors, from the alps to the coast and all parts between, but always and especially the New Zealand bush.

For me, the bush is the place where nothing else seems to matter, and being there is everything. The air is clear; the world is quiet; time stops. My ideal, which I’ve experienced on longer walks, is to reach a point where you have no idea what day of the week it is. On a few trips, I haven’t taken a watch. I found I slept when I needed to, started walking when I felt like it, ate when I was hungry. I was tuning in to natural rhythms, into the bush, the mountains, and to myself. You feel part of nature, no more special than the birds in the trees or any other creature. I’ve had my battles with depression, and in those times the bush is often a solace.

Max Polglaze is a former Forest Service ranger, and an old friend. Before I met him, however, I knew him from his bush poetry, scribbled in hut books in his Mt Arthur-Leslie-Kahurangi bailiwick. I copied one out once because it summed up my feeling about the bush:

My heart is in the valley of a thousand memories,

of campfire nights and sundrenched days and tall majestic trees.

Of sparkling crystal waters and the birdsong on the rise,

in the fair and lovely country of this bushland paradise.

More practically, I’ve maintained a lifelong habit of keeping logbooks. Half a century on, there are half a dozen of them stashed in a shed at our house at Rangihaeata. The early ones are very matter-of-fact. Of my first tramp, all that’s noted is ‘15 July, 1972, Richardson Track’. But they soon grow more descriptive and engaging. I’m constantly ‘zooming’ up valleys or ‘charging’ across rivers, and I begin to name my tramping companions, if there happen to be any. Reading these later journals transports me straight into the deep bush and tussocklands of those adventures, and they’ve proved a handy route guide for the account that follows. Most of it takes place in the South Island backcountry, but it begins, as my wanderings did, in a sleepy settlement north of Auckland.

Lonely Lake Hut, Kahurangi National Park, 2015.

Chapter 1

I was born in Helensville in 1951 and grew up on the family farm near Waimauku, a small farming community inland north-east of Muriwai Beach. From a very young age, I had a fair bit of freedom and plenty of territory to explore.

The farm was on Highway 16, the main road north of Auckland to Helensville. It was a gravel road back then, seven cars a week if we were lucky. If you saw a green van coming, well then it must be 2 pm on a Thursday, because that’s when Mrs Gardener does her shopping. Life was so predictable. The telephone operator would phone and say, ‘Does anyone know anyone with a black Wolseley? There’s a black Wolseley coming up the road!’ Heavens, a stranger! That same road now has tens of thousands of car movements a day.

My father Bob Kilgour was born on Jersey Island, and had his fourth birthday as his family sailed out to this part of the world, a one-way trip to the colonies. His mother Ivy was from several generations of French-speaking Jersey Islanders, and his father Douglas was a Scotsman – and, according to family legend, his father, Robert, was the illegitimate child of King Edward. They stepped off the boat at Onehunga Harbour, walked up the road, saw a little house with a pōhutukawa tree out front, and thought, ‘This’ll do.’ Eventually my grandparents got work as milkers on a dairy farm near Kumeu, and after a few years, they bought the farm at Waimauku.

Mum was Dorna deRaine Brasington. The middle name was a tip of the hat to her maternal French grandfather, Jules deRaine, around whom an air of intrigue and possible scandal floated. I never met him, but growing up I gained the impression that there was some perceived disgrace about Jules that made adults clam up. Recently, a relative of mine reported that his grave had been found in an overgrown corner of a Māori cemetery in Dargaville, with a headstone inscribed in both French and te reo Māori. It’s a mystery I’d dearly love to solve, but I fear the answer may have died with my mother.

Mum’s dad was the wonderfully named Silas Augustus Phillip Brasington. As a kid, what struck me most about my grandfather Silas was his sense of theatre. When he wrote out cheques, for instance, he would sign every one of his names. It practically covered the entire cheque, but always with beautiful penmanship. I remember watching him sign one at Wrightson’s, and slowly people started coming over to witness this work of art unfold. He stopped, looked up at the assistant, and said, ‘Just one more moment, lad,’ then carried on dotting all the Is and crossing the Ts before handing it over with the comment, ‘My mother always told me I should have been an artist.’

He had emigrated from Australia as a 20-year-old with a grand total of 20 shillings in his pocket. He laboured on farms, became a buttermaker and then according to family history played a significant role in establishing New Zealand’s early cooperative dairy system – although I’ve never found anything official giving him credit. The story I heard was that he got a position managing a New Zealand Dairy Company factory in Mt Eden – I know, Mt Eden sounds an odd location for a dairy factory, but that’s what I was told – and then moved the family to Waimauku to establish a cooperative factory there.

My parents met on Mum’s first morning at Waimauku primary school. She took the only spare seat left, next to Bob Kilgour, who at eight was her senior by a year. A friendship blossomed, and later a romance.

When Mum was 13, Silas was offered the position of managing a butter factory in London and the family decamped from Waimauku. They weren’t there long before war broke out. My grandfather felt obliged to keep the factory on track – butter was now classed an essential item – but Mum was given a choice: return to New Zealand, or stay with her family. She chose to stay, and suffered through the Blitz. She saw some horrible things and was permanently scarred by the experience. Years later, she would cringe whenever an airplane went overhead.

Back in Waimauku, Dad’s father Douglas had been struggling with the effects of a terrible accident. He’d seen some men struggling to hand-crank a vehicle on the local air-force base and when he went to help, the crank handle had rocketed into his head. He eventually died of complications arising from the injury and at the tender age of 16, Dad had to take over running the farm.

All this time, he and Mum had been writing to each other. There’s a strange story about their communication. Dad was a ham radio enthusiast. One night on his homemade crystal radio set he heard an SOS from a British flying boat, the Calpurnia, which flew mail between Australia and Britain during the war. It crashed and the radio operator, the only survivor, sent out an SOS but then died. Months later, some mail that Mum had sent to Dad was returned to her, marked as having been recovered in a damaged state from the wreckage of the Calpurnia. The aircraft whose SOS Dad heard had been carrying a love letter from Mum.

Even though communication was more complicated back then, it seemed easier to keep a relationship alive. And the horrors of the war would have added another element, that deep yearning for someone special on the other side of the world. When Mum got back to New Zealand, she and Dad picked up where they left off. They soon became pregnant (this was before they married, which must have been a bit scandalous), but sadly suffered a miscarriage.

Perhaps that was why Mum’s parents seemed to suddenly develop a dislike of Dad. My maternal grandmother was a terrible snob – I’ve only ever seen one photo of her with the hint of a smile; in all the rest she’s stony-faced – so maybe it was a class thing. In any case, they told Dad that if he wanted to marry their daughter he’d have to stump up an acre of land on the Kilgour farm for them to live on. (Dad’s mum lived close by us, too. With hindsight I know I probably should have spent more time learning from those old people.)

My parents married in 1950 and I was born soon after, followed by Barry, then Ross. My brothers and I are chalk and cheese. I was the black sheep of the family, the weakling, a scrawny thing, the one who got into mischief – or was blamed for it. They are both much more typical farmer’s sons, right down to their stockier build.

It was a small farm – but then they all were compared with today’s corporate operations. We started with 28 cows and that was considered a viable farming proposition. When it grew to 45 animals, it was one of the largest herds in the district. People would say, ‘Forty-five cows! Hope they know what they’re doing.’ Today’s 1000-strong herds would have been inconceivable back then, when having 100-odd productive cows was considered good enough to justify establishing a butter factory.

Nevertheless, my parents struggled financially. Once, they even seriously contemplated selling the farm. I remember breaking open my savings, holding out a few paltry shillings and asking, ‘Would this help?’ (I got told off for smashing a perfectly good piggybank.) But perhaps the money worries led to Dad looking for other work, because when I was about five he was offered a job as caretaker/park ranger on Kāpiti Island. I remember feeling so happy – that fascination I have with wild places was clearly already there, and what five-year-old boy wouldn’t be excited by the idea of living on a remote conservation island? Sadly for me, Mum didn’t want to leave her parents, so it didn’t happen.

As a member of the local cooperative dairy factory, Dad was rostered to work half a day every month at the Waimauku butter factory, and I would usually tag along. The co-op had a truck that could be used to collect the cans of milk and cream from beside the various farm gates, but most of the farmers used their own vehicle. In our case, Dad had an old Indian motorbike with a sidecar and I’d sit in that, trundling down the highway, stacking up cans on the sidecar’s foot platform as we went.

The factory was a typical pre-war concrete and tin thing. These days it’s a restaurant and craft store, and you’ll often see that with ex-dairy factories – they built those things to last! Inside it was dominated by big, squat stainless-steel cream vats, about the height of a man but much broader, with ladders set alongside. My job was to climb to the top of the vats and use a net to haul out any dead rats. We’d throw them out the back door to where all the stray dogs congregated. What a treat for a dog – freshly creamed rat! As for us humans, the butter from the Waimauku factory was always a hundred times yellower, richer and more delicious than anything store-bought, and that went for anything home-raised, home-baked or homemade in our eyes.

At the age of five, I began to disappear from home at night. I’d wake up in darkness with no inkling of the time but ready for an adventure, so I’d climb out the window and be gone. Often it was moonlight that drew me, and the stillness. As a kid of the 1950s, your days were driven by an expectation that you would be a nice and polite child. At night, when everyone else was asleep, I felt I had the freedom to follow my true nature.

I’d walk the farm until I collapsed. Dad would find me in the barn where the dogs and orphaned farm animals slept, curled up among hay bales, surrounded by calves and piglets. Sometimes he’d come across me in a paddock sleeping beside a cow for warmth. It was the beginning of a lifetime of wandering. I wasn’t going to be a North Auckland farmer – or indeed anything that required me to be tethered to one place for long.

Our property was 120 acres. There was an 1100-acre sheep farm across the road, and another farm up the back, and lots of bushy gullies that no one seemed to own, along with marae land nearby. All of it connected to sand dune country that led to Muriwai Beach. After a while, I began to range beyond our farm and to journey during daylight hours, walking what were really vast distances for a little fella. It wasn’t called ‘tramping’, and I didn’t think of it that way. It was just me running away from school or home, or heading out to the coast to collect some shellfish. A lot of this adventuring was unknown to my parents or teachers. As my brothers got older they’d occasionally tag along, but mostly I was alone – and happily so. I never felt in the least bit lonely or nervous, but rather that there was a big wide world out there waiting for me.

I did it all barefoot; that was how all of us district kids got around. In school photos from that era, almost no one is wearing shoes. If someone ever turned up wearing socks and shoes, even if it was winter, they’d get a puzzled look from the rest of us, and next day they’d be barefoot again. If the morning was especially cold and frosty, we’d warm our frozen feet in a nicely steaming cow pat. Our townie friends found it disgusting, but we thought it was a perfectly sensible solution.

Like my parents, I attended Waimauku School. I had learning challenges from the start – dyslexia, although it wasn’t diagnosed as such. When we had to write things from the blackboard I’d get down each letter one at a time, but then I’d struggle to put the words together. Every week we’d be asked to choose a book to read and write about. How on earth could I do that? In those days, they just stuck you in what was colloquially called the ‘dummy class’ and left you to it. I was puzzled – I know I’m a bit different, but why I am here? – and I also felt hurt. It certainly aggravated my rebellious streak.

When my primary school was organising its 100th anniversary (for 2021), they asked if I’d talk about life in the 1950s. I warned them it wouldn’t all be particularly positive. This was an era when they were trying to beat the Māori language out of everyone. A lot of my friends at school were Māori and we’d often use Māori words, just really basic terms sprinkled in with our English, such as ‘kia ora e hoa’, ‘ka pai’ and ‘mōrena’. We often defaulted to Māori names (I was ‘Paora’), and if something was broken or stuffed it was always ‘pakaru’. We were strapped for it, and I developed very strong calluses on my hands.

I was strapped, too, for using my left hand. (As an adult, I use both, and really the only thing I can’t do with my left hand is write well.) The more they punished me, the more I felt for others who are ostracised for being different. For example, I had a friend who was a bad stutterer. A new teacher once yelled at him, ‘Don’t you dare stutter at me, boy!’ When I explained that he couldn’t help it, she started yelling at me, and we were both marched off to the headmaster and punished for being cheeky. I learned a lot about discrimination as a result of those incidents, and became stronger in my convictions.

I had a sensitivity that was a little different, as well as a willingness to speak out. We used to have compulsory religious study once a week. The guy was a racist and had a horrible attitude. I used to challenge him on things and he would scream at me. I thought, ‘I’m getting out of here.’ During religious instruction, the Catholics were all required to sit out in a little shelter shed on the edge of the school grounds, so I decided I was going to be a Catholic. Then I discovered the shed was right next to the surrounding trees, and that I could disappear into the bush. So of course, I did exactly that.

In ‘dummy class’ I had more opportunities to vanish. In those days, there wasn’t much of a curriculum for ‘special students’, and we were given plenty of free time in the playground, which included an area of scrub and pine trees. There was a bit of a creek near the school, swampy in places, and